How To Understand About Scrubbing Leads In Affiliate Marketing?

Basically a SCRUB means: When an advertiser take’s your info and compare it with his existing database, If the leads you’re giving him is already in their database, then the advertiser won’t give you credit for that lead. You don’t get paid for that particular lead because advertiser already has that person/email in his database.

Scrubbing Lead has two meanings, one honest and one dishonest. The honest meaning refers to an advertiser or lead buyer doing real-time validation of leads in order to avoid buying duplicate or fraudulent leads. The better a lead buyer validates the leads that it might accept the more it can pay for qualified leads. An end lead buyer that does not have this capability will rely on a lead aggregator for this service, pay significantly less per lead and deal with the bad leads, or return duplicate or fraudulent leads for a refund.

How you can protect yourself from this?

Well, Honestly till now I have not found any concrete method to save myself from the “SCRUB”. Tho, You can do a few basic things.

To Protect Yourself

Always split test your offers

Maintain good relationship with your manager so that If you smell something suspicious you can talk with him/her and sometimes your manager will himself give you hints that you are being robbed

If you get $10 for an offer from “X” network and the same offer you see on “Y” network for $15 then there are high chances that you’ll see scrub because Advertiser will maintain their budget by scrubbing your leads. So, If you see 10 conversions on “X” network then you will probably see 3-4 Conversions on “Y” network!

Finally! If you feel like you are being scrubbed without any proper reason!… Then its time to move on!

So How Does This Improve?

Well the Affiliate companies are becoming more and more transparent with their statistics. Some are offering white label or generic offers in various competitive markets. These offers allow you to host the offer on your site and you can see exactly what the response codes are coming back from the advertisers. You are seeing these pop up in the mobile and dating industry probably the most but I strongly feel that we will see them popup for lots more in the future. Not only does this give you complete transparency but it also gives you amazing tracking features….. and also takes away fears of giving keywords and other competitive data to the affiliate companies themselves.

The Removal Of A Lead

in a traditional lead scrubbing scenario would only happen if that lead were unqualified and didn’t meet the criteria set forth by the company or person paying for said lead.

Considering the only leads that should be scrubbed to begin with are falsified in nature, fraudulent, or ones that fail to meet a specific set of guidelines by the paying entity—these leads have no business being paid for, ever! By anyone!

To our point above about a company’s survival — if a company or advertiser isn’t making money – or more frighteningly – is LOSING money paying for worthless unqualified leads — their company or service would soon cease to exist.

They would have no reason to continue with the offer that they were providing. They would likely terminate it, and when that happens, everybody loses.

After all is said and done, you now know the difference between lead scrubbing and lead shaving (and how they totally aren’t the same thing at all…yes, we just needed to repeat that). Lead scrubbing is an absolute necessity to maintain the integrity of a provider’s offer and to ensure that all the standards of a lead generation campaign are being met.